


Interest

by basin (cheydinhalian)



Category: Robot Series - Isaac Asimov
Genre: Androids, Gay Robots, M/M, Robot Feels, Robot POV, Robot/Human Relationships, Robots, daneel is weird and robots are weird and you should love them, for the love of god please help me isaac asimov has locked me in his basement, oh mygod how do i tag things on this website everything is so hard and if i do it wrong ill die, robot makeouts, the mortifying ordeal of posting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-20
Updated: 2020-02-20
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:07:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22815133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cheydinhalian/pseuds/basin
Summary: At any time, Daneel could, off the top of his head, tell you exactly how many hairs Elijah had in each of his eyebrows. He counted them reflexively, sometimes several times per second. It was comforting. The answer was predictable; the method of finding it, easy; number of times he had done so, enormous. He could tell you the number of pores on his face. He could tell you the exact length of each of his fingernails. It was relaxing; every day he would see Elijah in the morning and add another data point. It was reliable. It was soothing.
Relationships: Elijah Baley/R. Daneel Olivaw
Comments: 5
Kudos: 45





	Interest

Daneel Olivaw wasn't sure when it started, but sometime over the length of their partnership, it had become something of a habit for him to contemplate Elijah Baley. He was, in the end, a data robot. He liked to gather information.

At the moment Elijah sat across the room, one leg crossed over the other at the ankle. His eyes were directed at a paper located in his hand, but the focus of his pupils told Daneel that he was not reading it. Daneel gazed.

At any time, Daneel could, off the top of his head, tell you exactly how many hairs Elijah had in each of his eyebrows. He counted them reflexively, sometimes several times per second. It was comforting. The answer was predictable; the method of finding it, easy; number of times he had done so, enormous. He could tell you the number of pores on his face. He could tell you the exact length of each of his fingernails. It was relaxing; every day he would see Elijah in the morning and add another data point. It was reliable. It was soothing.

Elijah looked up at him. Had Daneel been human, it might have occurred to him that Elijah might have been aware he was being stared at, and that such an intrusion might have caused his apparent inability to focus on the paper he was holding, and that Elijah would inherently have some sort of opinion on the matter. But as it was, Daneel simply took the opportunity to trace the patterns in Elijah's irises for the 80,962nd time.

Yes, Daneel knew Elijah, inside and out.

...

Elijah was cupping Daneel's face in his hands. Daneel looked up at him, cool and uncertain. Elijah looked down at him like he wasn't sure what he was doing - face a little flushed, fingers a little shaky, Daneel noted. Elijah was asking him,

"Daneel, do you... Have you... How well do you know me?"

And Daneel said, "Rather well, I should say, partner Elijah."

And Elijah shook his head and said, "No, you're not getting me. I mean, how well can you predict me?"

Daneel considered that. He did know Elijah quite well. In fact he knew Elijah perhaps better than he knew anything else. He looked into Elijah's face and traced the patterns and found it all to be exactly in line with what he expected. Every wrinkle and little hair was in its place. Every ridge on the thumb pressed to Daneel's cheek was in precisely the right spot, as it had been last time Daneel had checked, as well as the several hundred thousand times he had checked before that.

Even the way Elijah behaved around Daneel was predictable. His feelings were almost cyclic in nature; from inferior to superior to inferior again. Daneel was content not to interfere with it. It was comfortable. It was familiar. It was an eternal confirmation of the data he had already gathered. It felt like how a nice warm blanket probably felt like to a human: safe, easy, and sleepy.

"You do surprise me occasionally, partner Elijah," Daneel said.

"Like I'm about to?" Elijah muttered perversely, and closed the gap.

...

Lips pressed against artificial lips, and then Elijah pulled back. Daneel had not closed his eyes for the duration of the thing and his gaze was level and ice-blue. Elijah waited a moment in embarrassed terror as Daneel simply sat, apparently processing what had happened.

"I don't understand," he said.

Robots, Elijah thought. Daneel was utterly perfect and horrifically intelligent, and yet here he was making him spell it out. He probably wanted him to squirm and was doing it on purpose, Elijah thought belligerently, despite knowing that such a thing was highly unlikely and almost impossible.

"I," he started. He swallowed. This was horrible. How he so wished he could wipe that eternal composure off of Daneel's stupid, perfect face.

"I," he tried again, as Daneel continued to stare directly at him. He looked away. Jehoshaphat, Lije, just spit it out, he thought, and said in a rush, "I might have a sort of... romantic interest... in... you."

Daneel continued to sit there like a wooden doll. Elijah wished something would fall from the sky and kill him instantly. Crushing on a robot was, in the first place, on par with getting a crush on a sofa or a bed, and Daneel's composure made it all the more obvious how inhuman he was. Elijah was more embarrassed than he had ever been in his life. This whole thing was a bad idea. He never should have agreed to work with the stupid robot in the first place.

"This is an unusual situation, isn't it?" Daneel said, finally.

Oh, god, someone hit me with a car, Elijah thought.

...

The inside of Elijah's mouth was an unknown, Daneel thought. Previous circumstances had made it unacceptable to explore but this was possibly changing.

"Elijah, will you confirm something for me?" he said crisply. Of course he had to double-check. He did not want to put Elijah in any distress.

Elijah, utterly flushed in the face and sweating, looked at Daneel with some trepidation. "Go right ahead, as long as you're not planning on embarrassing me any worse," he said petulantly.

"It is customary on earth," Daneel began, "For humans who experience mutual romantic attraction to kiss each other, sometimes even with an open mouth, so that their tongues might meet?"

Elijah gawked, such that the whites of his eyes stood out against his amazingly red face. "Um," he started.

Daneel waited.

"Yes, I suppose it is," Elijah concluded lamely.

And so it happened that Daneel gently placed his hand on the back of Elijah's neck and pulled him into another kiss. Elijah did not resist and Daneel parted his lips softly.

Now this was what he had been after. He ran his tongue along the roof of Elijah's mouth. There were wrinkles and divots in the flesh, myriad, and he took pleasure in cataloguing them for the first time. He watched Elijah's face for any sign of discomfort. His eyes were tightly closed, he saw, as if he was very tense, and for some reason he had stopped breathing.

Elijah squirmed and squeezed his arm, at which point Daneel pulled away immediately. "Have I misjudged-"

"You're fine, Daneel," Elijah gasped, "Just close your eyes, would you? It's custom."

Daneel complied and went back to what he was doing. The set of his teeth, the texture of the space beneath his tongue, he would learn it all - and even after he had learned it all, since it didn't take very long for a machine to memorize something perfectly, all he wanted to do was learn them again. At some point Elijah's legs had become wrapped around his waist and his hands had wound up in his hair, which Daneel took for approval, and he would have continued forever had Elijah not patted him on the upper arm and started to pull away.

Daneel sat back on his heels. Elijah stated lightly, "You can open your eyes now, Daneel," and the world flooded back.

"I'd like to explore all of you," Daneel said.

That tripped him up. He stuttered. Daneel waited as Elijah looked at him with those familiar eyes. Daneel catalogued their patterns again for the 80,963rd time.

"...Why are you doing this? What do you even get out of it?" he muttered, sweating. "You don't even... It's not like you could be interested in me."

"On the contrary, partner Elijah," Daneel said. "I am very interested in you. I have spent a long time observing you and it is a comfort to me. I would like to do so as much as possible."

Silence.

"I guess that's all human love amounts to," Elijah said, still sweating. The faintest smile played on his lips. "Robots in love. Who would have thought."

**Author's Note:**

> shoutouts to @honestlyawesome, and also @coffee and @fungus on waterfall, for making me feel like i know what i'm doing


End file.
